Awesome: Congress Accidentally Gutted Their Own Health Insurance

This is rich, and it shows what happens when 2,000+ page monstrosities are rammed through congress without anyone reading the bill. It seems that due to a drafting error, Congress may have accidentally excluded themselves from the Federal Employees Health Program. The idea was that members of Congress would purchase plans through the new insurance exchange, but that part of the plan doesn’t go into effect until 2014. The part of the bill that excludes members of Congress from the Federal Employees plan, however, does not have an effective date, and therefore went into effect immediately when the bill became law.

This is why large, complicated bills should not be passed. They typically have unintended consequences, and never function the way that they were intended. Even the state-run New York Times admitted as much when they wrote: “If they did not know exactly what they were doing to themselves, did lawmakers who wrote and passed the bill fully grasp the details of how it would influence the lives of other Americans?” The Democrats are now scrambling to figure out how to correct this error, but I for one am glad that they were caught off-guard. Serves them right.